tags » Flickr has always been one of the key names of the Web 2.0, but their pages can’t help me to love them more because of their staying in 90s. Flickr’s overall page structure has never been great. Just let me remove all of the style sheets and the fancy UI to see what’s inside.
A Flickr page without style sheets (left) and WAI homepage without style sheets (right).
Flickr is still staying on tables for non-tabular data. The usages of the lists are unbearable and lack of the good mark-up design is undeniable. It is totally in a contradiction with an almost perfect page structure example: homepage of W3C’s WAI. On Flickr, everything is a mess, including the hidden elements. Besides there is a list of failures that are captured in a few minutes:
- There are so much onclick, onchange attributes that ruins the whole mark-up. Keep the events on a separate js file to help search engines index what’s essential.
- Some of the style sheets are loading inline, why do end users have to load the same piece of CSS code on every page? Where’s the chance of using less bandwidth by caching the style sheet files then?
- Tiny icons near links aren’t backgrounds of the link elements. Which machine is interested in reading tones of useless tiny icons without any alt attributes?
- Some buttons have all uppercase titles which can be done with CSS easily without endangering the accessibility.
If the whole mark-up studied in detail, there are many more situations that are against of all W3C recommendations and web standards groups around the world. So the question is back again? What’s the importance of following standards then?
JBF provides some new generation energy to the web. She is working on interesting stuff like increasing efficiency in data on the web and making content more machine readable. (
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